March 30, 2022

Cultsauce's Wooden Handheld Console Hides Your Soldering Horrors in a Plywood-Cork Sandwich

from hackster.io

Pseudonymous maker and computer science student "cultsauce" has put together a handheld console with a difference: the circuit, including battery, screen, and Microchip ATtiny microcontroller, are all hosted on a plywood-and-cork sandwich.

"When it comes to electronics, it's the free-form designed ones that always catch my eye," cultsauce explains. "Seeing how all the wires and components are connected just make it so fascinating and nice to look at. I wanted to try building something in a similar style. Being aware my soldering skills are not as good as I'd like them to be, I decided to go for a bit easier but still kind of nice-looking option."

That "easier" approach: A triple-decker circuit sandwich, designed to hide any number of soldering sins. Having prepared, pre-programmed, and tested the design — a simple Snake game that runs on an ATtiny85 microcontroller and displays on a 120×64 OLED display, all powered by a CR2032 battery — in a more conventional breadboard, cultsauce transferred the prototype to a sheet of plywood.

Holes were drilled through the upper board for through-hole components, and solid jumper wire to provide electrical connections — running purely horizontally on the visible upper surface, for aesthetic purposes. A middle layer of cork provides a means of preventing pressure from damaging the connections, while a lower layer of wood closes everything up — and, handily, hides all the soldering.

"It may not be the best game ever made," cultsauce concludes, "but at least you can pat yourself on the back for even being able to build something like this yourself."

The full guide, including schematic, is available on Instructables; the source code has been published to GitHub under an unspecified open source license.